WordPress Tools You Need to Use in 2016

Every year brings in some new tendencies, requirements, trends and needs to every aspects of our life. What was the right choice for success and new accomplishments for the last year may not show the same results in the new 2016. And this is also true in web design and development sphere. The tools you used to enhance and better your website, may not seem as successful as they used to be a year before.

In this article I’d like to share with you some WordPress tools to keep up with the latest web design trends and tendencies. These are my own suggestions based on the personal testing of the recommended tools. They are sure to help you to make the right foot forward and take your website’s design and functionality to the next level.

Portfolio Gallery Theme

You can make the right step from the start by choosing an advanced theme that will show the content on your website in the most appealing way. With such a widespread popularity of different kind of visuals WordPress Portfolio Gallery theme can be your best partner.

It is a new and highly functional WordPress portfolio theme that does a great job in showcasing your galleries, portfolios and posts in an appealing way. It is capable of displaying your posts in large thumbnail images making it possible to display them as in a gallery. As your website visitors hover over the images they are shown a short info about the gallery or post. With the advanced lightbox that the theme features your posts and images can be displayed as a slideshow with various transition effects. The galleries and posts can be shown with infinite scrolling or with load more button options.

The theme has six beautiful layouts, all of them available in full width mode, which is a great way to drive attention to your content. The layouts are fully customizable and you can adjust them to fit your website. You can change the default menu location, specify the width of the menu and primary widget area.

The theme comes with a number of template pages. They will help you to create your Contact, Blog, About, Search and Login pages with much more ease and much less time. The theme also includes a contact form with Captcha protection.

Portfolio Gallery theme features include a bundle of feature-rich widgets to fill the sidebars of your website. You can make all the necessary adjustments to the widgets such as the number of images to be shown, image display mode, widget dimensions and choose a widget theme.

It’s responsive, user and SEO friendly. Your visitors are going to appreciate the look and the advanced functionality of your website.

Instagram Feed WD

Don’t miss the chance of bringing some Instagram popularity to your website. With the new Instagram Feed WD plugin you can do it with ease. It’s a really functional WordPress Instagram plugin to help you to integrate one of the most popular social networks to your website. Moreover, you can display the integrated images in four beautiful and modern layouts and provide a better user experience on your website. Among those four, I’ll point out Masonry and Blog Style layouts, with large image thumbnails, which will truly compliment your website style. Together with images your visitors can also see any available information about it, such as image caption, hashtags, number of likes, comments and image account details as well.

Upon clicking on the image, it can be either shown in the lightbox or the viewer can be redirected to the image profile in Instagram. The feature-rich lightbox of the plugin enables you to show images with their metadata and also allows your visitors to add comments within it. The lightbox can be used to display the images as a slideshow as well. Instagram Feed WD plugin also has an option for viewing videos within the lightbox and showing images in the Filmstrip mode.

It’s worth mentioning that the plugin is fully customizable and you can make changes to the layouts, themes and lightbox settings. Instagram Feed WD plugin is responsive and you can be sure that Instagram images on your website are accessible even on the smallest devices.

Monarch

Monarch is an advanced social media sharing WordPress plugin, which will enhance your website style and contribute to a more active social presence.

You have over 20 major social networks to choose from and five different locations to place the buttons with the available number of share counts. Speaking about share counts I would like to point out Monarch analytics, a great feature within the plugin, which gives you fast and up to date statistics about your posts’ overall sharing history. The plugin gives you full control over the coloring options and styles of the icons.

Social sharing buttons can be added on the images within your post and pages as well. Moreover, Monarch is capable of auto detecting all images in your posts as you enable media sharing option in the plugin settings.

The plugin enables you to create social sharing pop-ups and fly-ins, which are a proven way to enhance the sharing activity on your website. Monarch appears to be the most advanced and powerful social media sharing plugin for WordPress.

Bloom

Growing your email subscription list is a great way to drive more traffic and increase content engagement on your website. Just avoid doing it in an annoying and boring way. With well-designed and stylish opt-in forms of Bloom plugin your readers are never going to miss your new posts. Additionally, they’ll give your website an elegant and stylish look.

Bloom includes a sea of different design and style opt-in forms with the possibility of customizing every setting to best fit your website look. You can select different border sizes and edges, form fields and choose the right colors from the unlimited options provided. Advanced display settings allow you to choose where and when the opt-in forms will appear. You have full control to display them either on your entire site or in specific posts and pages. There is a possibility to add images to the forms and choose their location according to your needs.

Based on different factors (timed delay, after commenting, after scrolling, after purchase or after being inactive on a page) you can trigger various fly-in or pop-up forms. These triggers are a great way to increase conversion rate on your website.

With all this customization options available Bloom also comes with 115 pre-installed form templates, which you can edit and use at your convenience. The Bloom panel inside WordPress dashboard will help you to easily manage your Bloom accounts, email lists and other data.

I hope these advanced WordPress plugins will help you to enhance the functionality and design of your website and keep you on top for the time ahead. Make sure to implement them on your website and enjoy the results they’d bring. If you have any questions related to the plugins or the article, or you think there are other plugins worth mentioning, please feel free to comment below. I’d love to hear from you.